It all started in october of 2004, the launch of the game World of Warcraft.

I've been participating in open and closed betas for almost half a year at that time, but I had no idea what influence it could have on the rest of my life. Even now.

Unwrapping the box itself already was a lot of fun and a lot of attention went to its packaging, that was really obvious already, an amount of detail that didn't match any other game I was aware of, at that time.

I started out -due to my beta experiences- as an orc shaman, part of one of the two sides called the horde. A little green man with a mace, a shield and a lot of lightning power. It was a so called "hybrid" class, where WoW generally consists of 3 roles within a team, this class was able to fill 2 of those roles.

Being able to grow within this game, levels 0-60 where just numbers. Your social circle and activities grow as well, next to your reputation, something I already noticed early on in the game. Due to my personal interest to social activities and management, next to a big interest in community building I started climbing the ranks of our "group of people" (called a Guild) in no time. Organisation is something that wasn't familiar to a lot of people, since it wasn't actually mentioned in the games' manual for some reason...

That organisation also took care of a lot of my "spare time" in the real life, time that was there to fill in due to a rosterfree scholing system and a girlfriend that was also playing.

Together with her and 38 people of our guild we succeeded in one of the biggest things back then, actually finishing a dungeon (check out our movie in dutch here...)

A dungeon is nothing more than a big room filled with NPC's (non playing characters) that need coordination and willpower to overcome, next to a bit of strategy and planning ahead. You enter this dungeon with 40 people, devided into 8 groups of 5 people. Each individual has it's task, tanking (drawing attention of the NPC to you) DPS (damage per second, doing damage while not drawing attention from the NPC) and healing (a very underestimated task)

Next to those 3 distinct roles, a "raid" (that 40 persons) also consists of several keyroles, every guild has it's own set of people responsible for the success of the raid. In my first guild (Bomen Zijn Relaxed, recently started again) we had 2 raidleaders active (most of the time myself and dear friend Nozzeh) next to our guilds' officers team to keep the group structured and people assigned to different groups.

The World of Warcraft is scaringly comparible to real life situations where you work with a team. I learned a lot from playing this game, how to manage people, how to fullfill wishes and how to create balance between real and virtual life.

My next blog will be about the difference between "hardcore" and "casual" gamers, the process called natural progression and a servers' culture.